Some Artists Just Want To Make The World Go 'Round...

[elfs]

Sometimes, in an otherwise beautiful essay, there's a line that sets me off and makes me wonder why this person is daring to speak for me. Mary Oiver's essay The Artist's Task is such an essay. In it, she accurately accounts for all the things that an artist is trying to do when she sits down to write, or draw, or whatever.

There's a lot of truth to what she says. "Creative work requires loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity." There's the eternal cry of the artist: Leave me alone::

The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work — who is thus responsible to the work… Serious interruptions to work, therefore, are never the inopportune, cheerful, even loving interruptions which come to us from another.

But then she says something that, well, to be honest, makes me mad:

In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward.

He who does not crave that roofless place eternity should stay at home. Such a person is perfectly worthy, and useful, and even beautiful, but is not an artist.

To which I simply say, bullshit. Go ahead, be enraptured by your process all you want, but I know plenty of talented writers and illustrators for whom the last thing on their minds is to help the world go forward. These men and women are just trying to put food on the table, and their trade is daily work for daily bread, drawing pictures and writing words for an appreciative audience. There's a metric buttload of romance and genre fiction that even the author admits serves no better purpose than to help someone pass the time with a smile and a laugh. There's an equally imperial assload of art that does little more than entertain and titillate. And I refuse to say those people aren't "artists."

Occasionally, without meaning to, they may say something surprisingly insightful. They may paint something spectacular enough to be worth keeping and framing. They paid for their skills in time and money and blood, and to say they're not "an artist" is to misrepresent the vast gradations between the oxycontin-and-beer-addled deliquescent trailer dweller and the pretentions of the "I am an artiste!" set.